Posting Pictures - A How To

I’ve seen many people ask about how to upload and post their photos on Roadfood.So here’s a simple tutorial, along with pictures.

First off, you need someplace to store your photos. If you’re a Roadfood Insider (http://www.roadfood.com/Forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2401), you have a place here to store. For others there are plenty of places to store them at no charge. I use Flickr (www.flickr.com) which is a free service, and I’ll be using for my demonstration here. Other sites include www.photobucket.com or http://imageshack.us/

After you’ve taken your pictures and uploaded them to your storage site, you’re ready to proceed.

Please note, I’m using Flickr and other sites may vary, but the following should give you a good basic idea..

Once I uploaded my picture to Flickr, I clicked on the picture then clicked on the “All Sizes” button.

Next I selected the size I wanted, which was medium in this case. You don’t want the pic too large, otherwise you have to scroll left and right to read and view everything. I prefer to keep my pics under 800 wide.

After I clicked on the medium size, I scrolled down. Here you find the Photo’s URL, which I highlighted and copied (Highlight the link as shown, then right click your mouse and select “Copy”.

To add a picture you have to “Reply to Topic”. Or if your starting a topic, you’ll see the same menu bar. (You can use the Quick Reply, but you’ll have to add your own IMG tags – this is more for the advanced user).

Now you want to click on the Add Image Button. (You can type in text first then hit this button anywhere in the body of your message).

Now you’ll see 2 the 2 img boxes. You’ll want to click in the middle of these 2 boxes to “Paste” your image location.

Between the 2 img] [/img boxes you’ll paste your URL of the picture.

Click Post New Reply and if you did it right, your picture shall appear! Best of luck there….

I like Photobucket.com for its simplicity in managing files. Most of my current point and shoot camera photos are 6 megapixel, 2560 x 1920 pixel size in my iPhoto libraries. Obviously they are too big for posting in a message board so I export them out of iPhoto resized to 640 x 480 for posting and then upload them to Photobucket.com. Once uploaded in the example below I have a library of thumbnails with four different options to copy all ready complete. The IMG Code tag is the one I copy for Roadfood.com and then simply paste it in the message with no extra steps. The HTML Tag is another way that may be required in some message boards such as BuzzMN.com.

Once you upload you can edit your photo size. In the case of this screen capture it was larger than 640 x 480 so I selected to reduce it to what they call Message Board 640 x 480 size. You can also select Avatar 100 x 75, Thumbnail 160 x 120 or Website/Email 320 x 240. One thing you don't want to do once you post a picture in a message board is to edit it, delete it, or move it in Photobucket.com. If you do you will destroy your message board link.

Thanks Davydd (And Jim).. I just wanted to post a sample on how I do it.. Some basic framework to help newer posters figure this simple process out. Easily adapted to other photo sharing sites.. Now hopefully we'll see some more Chili Dog pics out there!

UncleVic & Davydd-Thanks for taking the time and effort to show how to do this. This question comes up all the time. I just posted a photo to a thread for the first time today through photobucket.com and it was surprisingly easy. Trust me, if I can do it, anybody can!

Watch out folks. I just upgraded my point and shoot camera I take into restaurants. I was using a 5 megapixel Olympus Stylus 500 but now have an 8 megapixel Canon Powershot SD850 IS Digital Elph. It arrived this afternoon.

If you are going to upload a picture just once for a message board and then forget about it there is another quick and easy solution and that is Tinypic.com. It is a pared down version of Photobucket.com but you do not manage your albums. You just upload and then copy the IMG tag file they give you and paste it here like this.

Do a "quote" on this message and see how it makes an undecipherable code for the picture. One thing about Tinypic is that once it is in the Internet ether you are not going to accidentally edit it and destroy the link. None of my photos have disappeared to my knowledge. There is another advantage. I've discovered that a lot of corporate offices deliberately filter out Photobucket.com so you can't see the images but seem to ignore TinyPic.com. TinyPic.com is about a no-brainer as you can get and you don't have to open an account to use it. It is totally anonymous. About all you can do is do a word search and find other anonymously uploaded photos if the uploader filled out a Tag title. A search on "tenderloin" found this (not my photo).

At the bottom of the picture there is a line that starts [img put your cursor on that line and then left click, it will then say copied. (it automatically copies into your PCs clipboard) Then paste that line into your post here. Or anywhere for that matter.

I used to do this on another forum. But within the last two weeks when I copy and past the URL link it does't show up as a picture, just as the typing of the link. I re-started my computer and that did not help either. I found that one of my photo sites, webshots, at least showed up as a clickable link (the others weren't clickable). Is it my computer at fault? It is only about three months old and I can't see why these instructions don't work for me when they've worked until recently. Help!